TRAMWAY
ALEXANDRA BIRCKEN, SHEILA HICKS, LAWRENCE LEK, MIKA ROTTENBERG AND AMIE SIEGEL
The venues, organisations and artists are all fundamentally shaped by the city in which they are based. Glasgow plays an important role in the way these organisations and artists have developed and how and where they work.
Glasgow’s cultural spaces exist predominately as a result of its industrial legacy.The city’s wealth in the 18th and 19th centuries came predominately from industry, shipbuilding, metal-works, textiles and its role as a key trading port. Many of our galleries and museums are reclaimed spaces born from this wealth of industry. The Tramway exhibition space itself was an industrial space, functioning as a tram factory and depot from 1893 until the early 1960s, when Glasgow’s tram services stopped.
Works by the five artists focus on ideas of production, manufacture, material culture, design, history and labour, which all in turn reflect back out upon the city.
This is an opportunity to consider feminist practices, ideas of authenticity, skill and craft, as well as what it means to discuss the work of artists who make alongside artists who work with new technologies.
The exhibition design is by Glasgow-based artist Martin Boyce. His works include the use of industrial materials, for example concrete, expanded steel and industrial lighting which often relate to the natural world. For this exhibition, he has applied elements of his sculptural vocabulary to frame the artists’ works in this monumental space.
The work that I was most intrigued by was that by artist Mika Rottenberg.
Rottenberg taps into truths about our modern consumer society, its inequalities and instant gratifications.
Her video installations and the narratives of her vivid characters are immersive, absorbing, uncomfortable, visceral, thought-provoking and fantastical all at once.
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